According to the World Health Organization, about five million people die from cancer every year. Drug treatment is one of the three major therapies for cancer. At present, drugs are used to treat cancers by the following mechanisms: interfering with or inhibiting cell division, regulating cell generation cycle, promoting tumor cell apoptosis, inhibiting angiogenesis, inhibiting oncogene activity, promoting tumor-suppressing gene activity, acting as tumor antigens, inhibiting telomerase activities, and interfering with information transfer of tumor cells.
In view of the high mortality rates associated with abnormal proliferative diseases including cancer, there exists a need for an effective treatment for these diseases.
Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a consequence of infection with the HIV-1 retrovirus, affects over 30 million people worldwide. AIDS is characterized by a number of otherwise very rare opportunistic infections such as Kaposi's sarcoma, caused by the Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpes virus, Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia, and other malignancies and infectious diseases. Patients with AIDS also suffer from severe weight loss, night sweats, swollen lymph nodes, and other consequences of a compromised immune system. In AIDS, CD4+ T cells are attacked by the virus and greatly reduced in number. Although treatments for AIDS do exist, including treatment with a “cocktail” of three drugs belonging to at least two classes of antiretroviral drugs, such as, for example, two nucleoside analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitors plus either a protease inhibitor or a non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor. Although this approach has proved reasonably successful in inhibiting the growth of HIV-1 and preventing the occurrence of opportunistic infections and other symptoms of AIDS, it is not a cure and the effectiveness of drug therapy can be limited by drug resistance, drug toxicity, and possible patient non-compliance. Therefore, there is a need for an improved therapy for AIDS.